You guys are familiar with the concept of maintenance, right? For example, every 3,000-5,000 miles, you’ve got to change the oil in your car. You’ve got to get the tires rotated, new filters, new brake pads, and a new timing belt every once in a while.

Your house has similar needs. You should be changing your furnace filters about once a month. You’ve got to make sure you clean your gutters at least once a year. Every 20 years or so, you’ll need a new roof.

But it goes deeper. You’ve got to put maintenance effort into your relationships. Haven’t taken the wife out in six months? Might be time. When’s the last time you gave one of your children individual attention? You get haircuts, right? Ladies, you shave your legs. I mean, maintenance for the things and people in our lives is a concept we’re all familiar with. And most of us are pretty good about maintenance of our bodies when it comes to our outward appearance.

But what about maintaining our inner physical systems? Such a thing is foreign to most people.

Think about it, why do we change the oil in our car? Why do we change the filters in our house? Because crap gets in there from the outside world. You think that doesn’t happen to you? Your body has filters and oil—metaphorically—as well. I think the closest thing to oil we have is water. It’s certainly the body’s lubricant. And most of us don’t drink enough water. (If you’re wondering, the best calculation is to take your body weight, divide it in half and drink that many ounces per day of water. So, for example, if you weight 150 lbs., drink 75 ounces of water a day.) It’s how your body flushes itself out, on top of all the other things for which you need water. Having enough water is the first line of defense against a world full of toxicity.

Inner filtration systems

But I really want to focus today on the body’s filtration system. There are so many ways the body takes what comes in, filters it, and sends the bad stuff out. And just like our homes and cars, these systems need maintenance!

We’ll start with the two most obvious filtration systems: your GI tract and your liver.

The GI Tract

Your GI tract consists of your mouth, esophagus, stomach, small and large intestines. It’s what filters the solid food you eat. Does the food contain useful nutrients? If so, the mouth and stomach break the solid food down so that these nutrients can be passed through the lining of your small intestine and into the bloodstream. The rest gets sent to the large intestine and then into the toilet.

How do you maintain your GI tract, you ask? Does it really need it? It’s basically on auto-pilot, right? Oh no my friends! There is a lot that can go wrong in that organ system, and the modern world is at the heart of so many issues in our gut that it’s become an epidemic.

First of all, the proper functioning of your gut requires a healthy balance of bacteria. They do so much down there, from providing digestive enzymes to helping with hormone signaling and communication with the brain, to emotional health to regular bowel movements to literally constituting the vast majority of your immune system. So don’t be fooled. Your gut needs maintenance.

First thing you need to do is start taking probiotics. Maybe a good probiotic supplement would help, but the best thing you can do is eat fermented foods, up to and including everything from good, grass-fed, sugar-free yogurt to sauerkraut to kombucha to kimchi to lassi and raw cheese. See, you have thousands of different types of good bacteria in your gut, and even the best probiotic supplements will only give you around five different strains; that’s why fermented food is so much better.

Second, you’ve got to limit as much as you can the crap that gets into this filter. Imagine your furnace filter… imagine throwing a rock through it. Do you think it’s going to be effective after that? That’s pretty much what we do to the lining of our small intestine when we consume things like antibiotics, painkillers, pesticide-covered foods and sugar. These chemicals tear holes in the intestinal lining, leading to a condition called intestinal permeability—or more colloquially—leaky gut.

Then, rather than just good nutrients getting into the bloodstream, all sorts of other things get through as well, which leads to an immune response, and then all sorts of nasty afflictions.

The Liver

The liver is the body’s main filtration system. When you drink alcohol, take medications, eat food covered in pesticides, etc., who does the filtering? Your liver! It gets worn out eventually if you don’t practice maintenance. In alcoholics and those addicted to opiates, you get liver failure and cirrhosis. Most people don’t get to such extremes, but our liver does get tired and becomes less effective over time. So what can you do?

Start with coffee enemas. It may seem weird to many of you, but a good way to clear out both your gut AND your liver is to flush the area with coffee (room temperature of course). Not only does this help to physically remove excess and stored waste and toxins, it helps flush the liver via a link between these two organs (large intestine and liver) called the enterohepatic veins. It allows the liver to expel toxins directly to the large intestine without filtering it through the entire body via the circulatory system. And if you flush your colon with coffee, it flushes the liver as well. A lifetime of throwing toxins at something invariably builds up.

For more liver detox, you can drink raw vegetable juice. This means particularly cabbage, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts, carrots and ginger. These are cleansing vegetables with the right combination of nutrients (Vitamin A, beta-carotine) that flushes the liver and helps remove fat. Also make sure you’re getting enough Vitamin C and Vitamin B-6. Potassium is also hugely beneficial for the liver. And it doesn’t have to come with bananas (which are high in sugar). You can get even more potassium from sweet potatoes, beans, beet greens and spinach.

The lungs

Your lungs are an incredibly important filtration system—but that goes along with your nose and throat as well. You’ve got tiny hairs all along your respiratory system called cilia, designed to catch dust, particles, airborne pathogens and junk that’s all around us.

First thing you can do is get an air filtration system for your house. You’ll never control the outside environment, but you can at least control YOUR environment. But, to actually detox your lungs, there are several things you can do.

One is deep breathing exercises. If you line on your back 2-3 times a day, breathe in deeply while counting to 5, hold your breath for 2 seconds then exhale while counting to five. Do this 10 times per session. It’s great for your lungs.

Various herbs contain compounds that will help clear out your lungs. Things like oregano (can be used in tea, in your cooking or directly as oil), licorice (can be used in tea), ginger (great in tea or as an ingredient in cooking), peppermint (can be eaten directly as leaves or peppermint oil in steaming water to inhale the steam—or in a sauna, or as a tea).

The kidneys

Kidneys! These are the fluid and blood detoxifiers. When your blood has toxins in it, your kidneys filter it out. When you drink something toxic, your kidneys separate that stuff out and send it to the bladder—then the toilet. It gets bad stuff out of you.

Just like with most organs, potassium helps detoxify. But here’s a unique one: quinine. This nutrient can be found in very high concentration in cranberries. It turns into hippuric acid in the liver, which then clears urea and uric acid out of the kidneys—these are the two compounds found in urine that are most likely to gum up your kidneys. So eat cranberries and drink cranberry juice (sugar-free if possible).

Drink alkaline water. Acid buildup in the kidneys are dangerous. You can counteract it with basic water. Also, here’s something to consider. Proteins of all macronutrients have the highest toxicity load. One of the most detrimental of these protein byproducts is called creatine. If your diet is too much protein, consider scaling that back and including more healthy fats and more veggies instead.

Kidney failure is real. In fact, it’s probably why God gave us two.

General detoxifiers

Vitamin C is a great general detoxifier – eat grapefruit, kiwi, bell peppers, oranges, tomatoes, strawberries, broccoli and pineapples.

Antioxidants – garlic, onion, cayenne pepper, ginger, oregano, turmeric, apples, green tea.

Folate-rich foods – lentils and black beans.